Sessions

It was recently announced at the Adobe MAX 2009 conference that Flash Player 10.1 will be installed on a large range of smartphones. To the surprise of everyone in the industry, Adobe also revealed that they will be releasing tools to allow Flash developers to leverage their existing skills and upcoming updates to the Flash IDE toolset to create native iPhone applications.

This session will recap and expand on what was covered in the Adobe MAX 2009 sessions. It will explain some of the engineering magic to make your ActionScript project become an ipa (iPhone application). It will also cover how and what is changed under the hood and how it affects the way your code is executed. Best practices for coding Flash applications for devices with smaller CPUs and memory availability will also be discussed.

Elad will discuss higher level architecture overviews of the new APIs in AIR 2 and how they tie in with AIR 1.5. During the session he will demonstrate experiments using AIR 2 and dive into the code to leverage the new APIs. The experiments will emphasize the new AIR 2 capabilities announced at Adobe MAX 2009.

Collaborate Today, Empower Tomorrow: Business Strategies for Partnering with Education

In this talk see the 5 immediate steps to build meaningful relationships with academia. From product prototyping and development to research projects and design challenges, witness the benefits that the “Power to Do” can bring to you and your organization.

Telling stories with Flash: From the slums of Jamaica and the clubs of Ibiza

Josh will discuss the creation of the two bluecadet projects, the Webby / Emmy award winning LiveHopeLove.com and the SXSW award winning JamesZabiela.com. In considering LiveHopeLove, he will discuss the possibilities and limitations of creating a journalistic narrative on the web, as well offer some tips on collecting content, field reporting and production. Discussing JamesZabiela.com, he will focus on enhancing the Flash experience for the user and site admin by integrating Drupal, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

What made the Flash community grow into the vibrant and amazing community it is today wasn’t Flash itself. Instead, it was the beautiful, amazing, and downright cool things that people were creating with Flash. In fact, some of the coolest stuff created with Flash was often created by designers, artists and other non-developers. These people created the sizzle that made Flash not just another plugin – but today they are becoming an endangered species.

Flash has matured incredibly in the last 10 years – but it has done so in a way that has blocked non-developers from even getting started. Why is that the case? The simple fact of the matter is that with prior versions of Flash you could learn the tool and how program ActionScript through creative play. These days, unless you already have a background in object-oriented programming, that method of learning is simply not an option. This is where HYPE comes in.

HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. The goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program. There is very little beyond the basics of programming (variables, conditionals, loops, and functions) that someone needs to know to use HYPE. But, as that person learns more about programming they can extend HYPE and thus both grow their skills and inspire the next generation.

In this session Branden will, for the first time, publicly introduce HYPE – how to use it, how it works, and how it can be extended to bring creative play back to Flash.

Deploying streaming video with Flash Media Server (FMS) has many advantages from more efficient bandwidth usage, faster start to playing video and enhanced digital right management. With the release of Flash Media server 3.5 have come new powerful capabilities including live DVR functionality, Dynamic Streaming, H.264 support and many others.

In this session Michael will walked through the development process of creating a streaming video application. Also covered will be guided tour through both client side and sever side APIs as well as the process of using FMS 3.5’s new capabilities like creating DVR like functionality with the ability to pause and rewind live video and multiple bitrate and bandwidth detection via dynamic streaming. Attendees will leave this session with an understanding of FMS works and how to implement in a project.

Finalist and winner of Adobe MAX 2009 award, demonstration of a virtual environment and platform for training emergency responders. Used by tens of thousands of responders each month. This session shows that you don’t need glitz to have an effective product, if you’re solving the right problem.

You are a developer or a designer. Isolated by yourself from your coworkers. Gentlemen, your process can be rebuilt. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first smooth workflow. You or your team can have that process.

The Importance of Whiskey While Working (and other work flow tips, too!)

Big Spaceship is a place where pushing the limits meets extreme deadlines on a regular basis. The keys to success? A philosophy that affords close collaboration and communication, coupled with a couple of clever solutions to common problems… and some really ugly placeholder art. Join Jamie as he details the way the Spaceship ticks and how you can apply these fundamentals to your own process.

In this session we will dig into the details of Adobe’s ExternalInterface API, and learn how to use it to bridge Javascript and Flash. We will cover some common gotchas around security and page loading. We will also look at where and why you might want to use this capability, and what sorts of design problems you can address by using javascript and Flash in combination.

Learn to use Flex to create liquid layout applications that run within the Flash IDE. These tools can speed up the creative pipeline for designers and simplify complex tasks. Starting with the basics of creating custom SWF panels using Flex, we’ll then introduce JSFL/Extendscript (the Flash IDE Document Object Model) as well as cover techniques including manipulating creative content in SWF documents and local file system access.

HTML and CSS have always been cordial. Over the past few years, you’ve even been comfortable enough to ask your parents if JavaScript could stay for dinner. But how you do play nicely with Flash without getting beat up after school? Often the black sheep, Flash has adopted a bad rap with standardistas. This presentation will show you how to harness appropriate and inventive combinations of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash. But beware: you might make some new BFFs along the way.

From basic setup, little ah-ha’s, dude-com’ons, and a very big where-was-this-before-I-coded-everything, J will show you 5 things he discovered that he wish he knew BEFORE he started working in Papervison3D. If you’re looking to start with Papervision3D, have had difficulty getting the basics down, or have your own ah-ha’s and dude-com’ons to share, this discussion is for you.

From code to product: a developer’s checklist before releasing an AIR application

In this talk Arpit will discuss features you should consider adding before you release an AIR application. He will cover items including Application versioning, logging, gracefully handling errors and allowing users to communicate issues to you when things go wrong. Reviews of helpful open source libraries as well as strategies for planning the release of your next killer AIR app.

FlexUnit 4 is the gold standard of unit testing for the Flash Platform. Come learn about the new features that have been added into this powerful new release, with examples demonstrating how to leverage them in order to get the most from your projects.

Swiz is a framework for Adobe Flex that aims to bring complete simplicity to RIA development. Swiz provides Inversion of Control, event handing, and simple life cycle for asynchronous remote methods. In contrast to other major frameworks for Flex, Swiz imposes no JEE patterns on your code, no repetitive folder layouts, and no boilerplate code on your development. Swiz represents best practices learned from the top RIA developers at some of the best consulting firms in the industry, enabling Swiz to be simple, lightweight, and extremely productive.

Are your games riddled with ugly timeline code? In this session aimed at intermediate ActionScript developers, learn to apply the principles of object-oriented programming to produce cleaner code and better games. Discover solutions to specific problems in game development, such as depth sorting and collision detection.

Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) will enable the rapid development of rich media experiences that can take advantage of the latest features that the flash platform has to offer, such as Dynamic Streaming from Adobe Flash Media Server. This presentation will provide an introduction to OSMF, show examples of where it is being used today, and show how you can use it in your current projects. You will also learn how OSMF can be extended with plugins that provide a range functionality such as connecting to CDNs (e.g, Akamai), monetizing with ads, and tracking/analytics.

This session examines elements of building a simple blogging application using Adobe AIR and Cairngorm.
The application is complex enough and contains enough features to get a sense of working with the Cairngorm framework without becoming too repetitive. Implemented features include, user registration, login, adding of posts and others. The first part of the presentation will be a brief introduction to Adobe air focusing on the SQLite database that drives the application.
The second will be a brief overview of Cairngorm. The remainder of the presentation will be spent examining the sample application followed by a question and answer period.